Controllers Overview

The Amazon Fire TV platform supports user input from the Amazon Fire TV Remote, the Fire TV Voice Remote, the Fire game controller, and other game controllers that support the Bluetooth HID gamepad profile. All controllers must be paired with the device to be used.

All the Amazon Fire TV controllers are Android input devices. You use the same techniques and APIs to manage input from those devices as you would any other Android input device.

In particular, simple input from any controller such as navigation or selection can be managed through key events in the same way you would handle input from a keyboard or a button pad.

Buttons

Most Amazon Fire TV remote controls have these buttons. Some Fire TV remotes do not include the microphone (voice search) button.

Remote control

The remote controllers for Fire TV Edition has some additional buttons — such as volume up/down, power, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other apps. However, these buttons can't be mapped to events in third-party apps, so the buttons shown in the above Fire TV remote are effectively the same available buttons for Fire TV Edition remote controllers, even if the remotes look a bit different.

As with all input events, your listener method should return true to capture the event and handle it, or pass that event on to super.onKeyDown() so that other controls can manage it.

Input Event Reference

The following table describes the buttons, the Android KeyEvent constants, and the default behavior of those buttons. None of the Amazon Fire TV remotes raises motion events (from the Android MotionEvent class).

If you do not capture a specific input event the default behavior occurs.

Button

KeyEvent

Default Behavior

Home

none

Return the user to the Home screen. This is a system event and cannot be intercepted.